Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [26]
Philadelphia is a long, dreary, dangerous city to trek through on foot, and the bridges over the Delaware River from New Jersey are few and far apart; how would a cat, or even a person without maps or signs, know which roads led to bridges? How would it have the courage to cross those roaring vibrating metal spans? For how many days did it crouch in the weeds and stare at that rumbling high horror before setting foot on it? Or could it, maybe, swim? Cats are fair swimmers, but the Delaware there is a mighty stretch, open to international shipping, and poisonously filthy, full of rushing flotsam, sewage, oil slicks.
However many times we hear the stories, there’s something moving about them. Even for a human on wheels, speaking the language and armed with street maps, it’s not a light journey, along those highways and across that river and through that city; what a thing to require of a small speechless battered creature, thrown from a wrecked car.
And, of course, how did it know the way?
The unpalatable truth is that cats have ways of locating things that we can no more imagine than we can imagine inhabitants of another planet breathing methane gas. We’re limited by our personal experience, whatever our pretensions to abstract conception.
At a cat show recently, two Siamese kittens escaped from their cage and vanished completely; the doors were locked and the building searched; no kittens. Some time later they were found out in the parking lot sitting on the roof of their own car, waiting. As a person who has more than once climbed into the driver’s seat of a car like my own and tried futilely to turn my key in the ignition, a person who has many times, with eyes placed far above tire level and a rudimentary knowledge of automotive makes and models, searched vainly for my car in a parking lot, I find this just as mysterious as homing. It seems to be a sense of the uniqueness of a thing, so that there can be only one right car, only one right road, and these right things call to the cat, and are not to be confused with other, identical, cars and roads. The sense works in unfathomable ways, and fails just as unfathomably: a cat who has seen your briefcase a hundred times in your hand or in the closet may be terrified of it on the living room floor, fluff up its tail, approach it cautiously, ready to turn and flee, and then, inches away, recognize it and feel a perfect fool and have to sit down and wash or pretend to be interested in something else across the room.
How can a creature who can find its own car in a lot or its own home across three states fail to recognize a briefcase in the wrong place? We’ll never know. We see things, not as themselves, but as members of classes and categories, and that leads us to use different equipment. Maybe we never had this sense of things from the beginning, or maybe we’ve been relying too long on crutches like reason and maps.
If stories about homing cats rouse the sympathies, and the impulse to reach a hand across time and space to help, stories of psi trailing simply make us nervous.
Psi trailing is the scientific name for the unscientific act of finding people who went away into the unknown.
Friends of my family gave their cat to a kind neighbor in Washington, D.C., when they moved to Ohio. The cat, who had never been out of Washington before, took five months to find them. The man of the family still staunchly insists that it can’t be the same cat, only an identical cat with identical habits that came to their door clamoring to be let in, emaciated and with serious clinical evidence of hard traveling, five months after their own cat had vanished from her new home. I know how he feels. Veterinary and dental evidence be damned; things like that can get on your nerves.
Dr. J. B. Rhine, former director of the famous Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University, investigated and substantiated some of these stories. In two of the best-documented cases, a